The Adjacent Possible – Recently Popularized by Steven Johnson, the Adjacent Possible is “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” And an interesting truth about it is that with each new thing you learn, you open doors to new ways to combine and remix the possibilities. Consider YouTube.

How many of you had trouble with the circles task? What types of ideas did you come up with? Were your ideas fluid? Flexible? Original? How many of you looked up the answers on your smartphone? Why didn’t you?

Which is better? 92% – 96% – 99.5%

How many of you felt limited because you didn’t think you were good at drawing? How many of you think you can draw? If we could prove to you that you can draw in the next 5 minutes, would you be open to trying some of the other ideas we have to share with you today?

Teaching Idea: share this video/activity when you feel your students need a little Creative Confidence, something that is becoming more and more important as divergent thinking and transactive thinking continue to become primary forces in the 21st century.

In Class

BackChanneling

Beyond Class

Flipgrid – Flipgrid is where your students go to share ideas and learn together. It’s where students amplify and feel amplified. It’s video the way students use video. Short. Authentic. And fun! That’s why it’s the leading video discussion platform used by tens of millions of PreK to PhD educators, students, and families in 150 countries

Linoit – is an online tool which can serve as a virtual bulletin board for both students and teachers. This tool offers a variety of canvases (backgrounds) for users to choose from and allows them to post sticky notes, videos, and documents to these canvases.

Have you considered Screencasting?

Screencasting is a Teacher Trick that should be in every teacher’s toolkit. Simply put, screencasting is recording your computer screen while recording your voice to make a video that can be shared with others. You can make instructional videos, feedback videos, showcase videos, interactive videos and more. While there are many tools that teachers can buy for screencasting, there are now some really great ones that are free and play right in the browser. Below, we have put a quick introduction to Screencastify which is a plug in for the Google Chrome browser. This tool lets teachers and students make screencasts and easily share them to their Google Drive accounts or to their Youtube accounts. Enjoy!

For those of you not familiar with the Gif file format, GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and it is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987. And just so you know, Steve Wilhite and his fellow creators at CompuServe have long fought for the word to be pronounced Jif with a soft “G” /ˈdʒɪf/, like the peanut butter. In fact, it has been noted that CompuServe employees would often say, “Choosy developers choose GIF.”

Today, making gifs is easy. Go to Gifs.com, copy and paste in the video you want to convert to a gif, and with a couple of quick clicks you have a looping gif. You can even turn on the audio so that the audio loops. Here is an example for you.

What did you learn today?

Benevolent Contagion as a force multiplier.

Tangentially connect experiences to learning so that you give your students something to talk about outside of class.

Another trick to get people talking is to pair Fun Theory with Active Learning.Then share some fun and strategies with them. Consider letting students use their phones in the first five minutes of class for:

In 350 BCE, Aristotle wrote that “exercise in repeatedly recalling a thing strengthens the memory.”

Take advantage of the the “Testing Effect,” also known as “Retrieval Practice” to make the most out of your instruction. Learning is good, but retrieving is better, so may want to consider some retrieval practice games.